Church Growth By Intimidation

This was not your usual revival meeting. One man came forward to make an impressive contribution from a real estate deal. Instead of the adulation he envisioned, this man received a thundering rebuke and died on the spot. The guys with the stretcher hardly had time to get his body to the morgue before the man’s wife showed up. She betrayed her complicity in her husband’s scam and promptly joined him in death.

Needless to say, everyone in town was a little rattled! Whispers were heard on the street: “Don’t get too close to those Christian unless you want to put your life on the line.” The whispers were not without warrant. The basic problem with this late couple was an attempt to represent themselves as something they were not. They wanted to LOOK LIKE the real deal without BEING the real deal. Perhaps they actually deluded themselves into thinking they were the real deal. But, God was not fooled by this sham and made His point with double corpses as exclamation points.

Here is Luke’s summary of the reputation of the early church after the “double death revival” meeting:  “But none of the rest dared to associate with them; however, the people held them in high esteem” (Acts 5:13). The average Joe of Jerusalem respected the saints and appreciated their commitment. But he also had enough sense to realize that an insincere association with these folks could prove fatal.

So here is what I find fascinating. Some would say that church growth requires us to present ourselves to the average Joe as unthreatening and undemanding. We should demurely declare, “Hey, come hang with us. We are benign enough to be safe and unintimidating. You’ll feel perfectly at ease.”

But look at Acts 5:14!  When the church was respected but intimidating, that's when growth kicked into high gear!  Luke reports, “And all the more believers in the Lord, multitudes of men and women, were constantly added to their number” (Acts 5:14).  The word “and” at the beginning of the verse tells us that when the church was frighteningly  real, that is when its growth went into overdrive! 

Suppose someone comes among us and says, “I respect your devotion and dedication, but I’m not ready to make this kind of commitment.”  Don’t interpret that comment as a call for us to become less committed or to hide our devotion to Jesus under a bushel basket.  It’s an affirmation we are following the lead of one of the fastest growing churches in history.  We may be scary to an average Joe when we are the real deal, but that is also when he sees that in Jesus you don’t have to live a life that’s just average.

Comments

[Austin]

Right on.